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Gravity can exist without mass, dark matter could be myth: Study (interestingengineering.com)

submitted 1 month ago by Espiritdescali@futurology.today to c/futurology@futurology.today

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[–] mipadaitu@lemmy.world 40 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Listened to a dark matter researcher a while back and he said "Dark matter is a name for an observation, not a theory" and I think that's a pretty good description.

They saw something weird with large scale observations and gave it a bad name. It's something that's done on a pretty regular basis in Astronomy. They really need to stop naming things before they're fully described. Of course how do you talk about something before it's named? No idea.

Maybe they just need to be better about letting go of poorly named phenomena.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's the same idea as "the dark ages". All it means is we don't have information about it.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I take “the dark ages” to mean a lot more than that. And I don’t think that’s particularly unique.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

How do you mean?
It's just a term to describe not having enough information to know what happened.

It's "dark" because we can't see/have no knowledge of what the events were. For history we don't have written records that describes events during those years. For dark matter we don't have any information on what it might be.

That's simply the historical and scientific method of labeling things like that. There is no other deeper meaning to it.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[1] The phrase Dark Age(s) itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 when he referred to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.[3][4] The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness in Europe between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.[1] Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.

Source. I use it in the former sense, which I think is more common.

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Laymen may use the former. But historians use the latter:

Others, however, have used the term to denote the relative scarcity of records regarding at least the early part of the Middle Ages.

That's literally the meaning of the the term, and why it's also used for 'dark' matter.

It doesn't matter how you decide to use it, what matters is how the scientific community uses it.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Or start calling it Ninja Phenomena. Why is the observation not matching with the models and vice versa? It's those Ninja Phenomena at it again, wrecking stuff and hiding away!